1) I think PERL is easy because I find it easy to emulate what I do in a shell (bourne, windows, etc.) that will then (if done right) be cross-platform. The modules from CPAN can be a lifesaver as well (guess they're similar to 'libraries', right?)

2) The votes for PERL now show as zero... which is wrong. When I voted, it moved up to two, and with the recent PERL comments I would expect perhaps at least one more. And yet it's zero. What happened? Has someone sabotaged this vote?

2) The votes for PERL now show as zero... which is wrong. When I voted, it moved up to two, and with the recent PERL comments I would expect perhaps at least one more. And yet it's zero. What happened? Has someone sabotaged this vote?

i think you must have voted before Carpetsmoker edited the poll. my votes are wrong too.

Funny how people call Perl "easy", I always found if chaotic, ugly, and hard ...

That's interesting. I respect perl, and I'm happy that other folks are able to get practical usage out of it. My cousin, when he was 16, claimed to learn perl in a day.

C-style languages are logical to me. Legacy languages (Cobol, Natural) -- same thing. As I mentioned earlier, I like python, and I'm sure if I took the time to learn php I'd find it straightforward and useful.

Yet every time I've decided to learn/practice with perl, it has seemed arcane and kludgey to me. I know it rocks (I'm told so repeatedly), but apparently it doesn't jibe with the way my mind works.

I use (pd)ksh, gawk, (gsed) and other legacy tr, cut, ....
To make my wrappers "Windows users friendly", I put them in zenity.
Have some uneasy tasks, translate tables from html pages and send the data to postgresql database.
Take those financial data and generate charts.
I balance between using sql functions or keep ksh in control.
When I looked at CPAN modules to handle some tasks, but for each module, you have to read the pod to finally only use one function ksh or the OS userland can do in a one-liner.
There are modules for everything I need. But, gosh!, you first have the chose the right module, mean reading and comparing even more pods.

Always the case with languages (and window managers) which pretend to do everything. I cmpare them to a Black&Decker: does everything you want ... unefficiently.
Drill, but not as good as a driller, saws, but not as good as a circle-saw, ...

Yet every time I've decided to learn/practice with perl, it has seemed arcane and kludgey to me.

i agree perl is kludgey (TIMTOWTDI), but once you get past the initial discomfort it really rocks. Also, CPAN is probably perl's biggest asset.
actually, perl is a powerful tool for sys-administration.

2) The votes for PERL now show as zero... which is wrong. When I voted, it moved up to two, and with the recent PERL comments I would expect perhaps at least one more. And yet it's zero. What happened? Has someone sabotaged this vote?

The got screwed because I changed the poll, I added a few languages and changed the order alphabetically, I'm sorry, I didn't know this would mess up the results
Your vote is now registered for Java ... And even worse, as far as I can see there is no way to change it ...

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

Yet every time I've decided to learn/practice with perl, it has seemed arcane and kludgey to me. I know it rocks (I'm told so repeatedly)...

Perl's heritage starts with shell programming & blenderizes several constructs from C (amongst several other sources...). Given that its expressiveness is greater than what is offered by most other languages, Perl code can be hard to fathom (for example, study the examples from The Perl Journal's elite...), plus, consider how well regular expressions are so well integrated into the language. It can be hard at times knowing where the Perl specific code ends & regular expressions begin. At the same time, a well structured Perl script can be found in a single (yet convoluted... ) regular expression.

As my own proficiency in Perl has grown, the code I write has gotten denser, & the higher the probability that others will give up trying to understand all the nuances. As most of the Perl I write is only for my own benefit, this doesn't really matter, however, the point remains that Perl can help speed up a lot of work especially when it comes to parsing & translating text.

Perl has it's oddities but really it's not that bad, unless you pass out while reading the fine manual page anyway.

The only thing I hate about Perl is I'm used to writing hash['key'] not hash{'key'} and my $var sounds self centred >_>

Quote:

Originally Posted by 18Googol2

HTML is scripting language, but php, javascript, shell are scripting language too, and they are in the pool

HTML is a mark up language for defining document structure not a scripting language... Scripting is done via external or embedded langauges (i.e JavaScript, Perl, PHP, etc). Although it's a bit polluted these days HTMLs really a nice language for what it was designed for IMHO.

You could say I'm someone who feels 'dirty' doing things in HTML, that really belong in a stylesheet whenever possible ^_^

So, the next person who chooses java as a favorite language can vote for perl instead. They'll trade votes with ai-danno.

Problem solved.

Thanks, mate!

And thanks to Carpetsmoker for explaining what happened.

It's interesting that there is so much conversation surrounding Perl. If you read some other forums for years people have been comparing it to Latin (aka, a dead language.) Perhaps as a "web programming language" it is... and yet, given its powers as described in previous posts ("parsing & translating text" and "a powerful tool for sys-administration") , it seems to take a licking and keep on ticking.

I started learning Ruby about a month ago and I like it a lot more than Perl. The syntax is a lot cleaner and easier to work with. Take functions, for example. You can just say:

Code:

def fn(param1, param2, param3)
...
end

instead of:

Code:

sub fn {
my ($param1, $param2, $param3) = @_;
...
}

That just seems so much harder than it needs to be. I practically have to break out the book every time I want to declare a function in Perl. I like Ruby a lot better. I think the design of it is just really good.